Caro Suerkemper

Rapture and Ecstasy
by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Frankfurt 2012)

Caro Suerkemper’s work is wonderfully delirious! The religious rapture familiar to us from baroque times was metaphysically based. But Caro Suerkemper updates it to the present, making it worldly by ecstasizing skin, pores and body orifices. Her artistic domain is thoroughly feminine. Already the size of these glazed ceramic figures is reminiscent of possible female cupids for whom everything was permitted in olden times. Their exorbitant innocence is limitless. Caro is the director who establishes the hierarchies, the world “above” and the world “below”, the interior and the exterior – and the voluptuousness of rapture by orchestrating ecstasies with lusty whisperings, groanings and whinings. The illustrations do not do justice to these sculptures. One has to walk around them and devour them with one’s eyes. One has to surrender to the lewd and lascivious, the lustful and the painful, the ecstatic and the ascetic – the ancient Christian-Christological body paradigms – with a shudder of recognition.
In Caro Suerkemper’s pandemonium, each individual is there for the next. One shares rapturously and even mischievously a lust for suffering, for lust itself, or just the expectation of lust. This is witnessed for example by the foot of a figure in a frilly skirt. Sitting on a round pedestal, her foot is inclined inwardly, the instep taut and the toes spasmodically splayed. But look at her countenance: a moving, lustily suffering expression, expecting her arms and hands clenched behind her back to be bound at any moment.

One of my favourite sculptures is the kneeling pregnant figure cast in bronze. With hands folded at breast height and head thrown back, she prays fervently with open mouth and tongue extended. On lifting the dainty dress that Caro has fashioned for her, her delightful posterior is revealed. But for what is she praying? It could be anything: that everything shall go well, that a saint shall see the light of the day, that she herself shall soon be impregnated again although already pregnant. Intensity, absurdity and irony all meet here at a single point of speechless rapture.

Caro infiltrates art and creative craftsmanship ranging from Bernini to the Delft tiles. She is a prankster who loves experimenting, and lives in continuous symbiosis with her figures. She laughs and suffers with them. Her kind of language and way of talking links works and actions as in her numerous watercolours. As if there were a dialogue, as if she were replying to the demands of those involved in her works.

While the American artist Jeff Koons lets communicative coldness collapse into infantile everyday objects, Caro Suerkemper takes recourse to European tradition and irreverently glorifies the coded metaphors of olden times, creating an orgy of explosive sensuality.

In this sense Caro Suerkemper is like the mystic Teresa of Ávila: obsessive and inspired. El Castillo Interior (The Interior Castle) authored by Teresa in 1577 contains seven “mansions”, so the Villa Metzler in Frankfurt / Main has now become Caro’s Castle. In each of the rooms, historically reconstructed in different styles –aristocratic, grand bourgeois –, there is a gauntlet to be picked up: a sculpture by the artist that is precisely placed in the right position. I think I know exactly what happens: the sculpture influences the room so strongly that when it is no longer there, it will still appear as an afterimage. It will have taken such hold in our unconscious minds that we shall physically feel its absence.